Sony Pictures wants to look past real-world concerns and focus on a world of fantasy. Deadline reports the studio has bought Robert Rodriguez's remake of the 1983 Frank Frazetta and Ralph Bakshi animated film Fire and Ice.

The original follows a war between ice- and fire-wielding groups located in Icepeak and Firekeep. Although the original is just 83 minutes long, Sony and Rodriguez see franchise potential.

Back in 2012, Rodriguez had Machete Kills and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For on his plate, but he was also looking forward to Fire and Ice as his Sin City follow-up. Rodriguez and Frazetta became friends before the artist's death in 2010.

"I thought, ‘I wish they could have made it look more like the paintings, but I guess they’d have had to paint each frame,’" he said. "Now, you could do that. You could make it look like you were in his imagination. He didn’t use models, he didn’t use swipes. He painted purely from his imagination, and the characters and the colors made you feel like you were in a dream, and a fully realized and completely imagined world. It was so visual and arresting."

Rodriguez noted that the remake began as a smaller operation, but eventually grew with the scope of the story. The filmmaker also discussed a different visual take for this project than he used when adapting Frank Miller's comics.

"Sin City reflected Miller’s two-dimensional plane and had an abstract very graphic quality to it, while Frazetta’s is this heightened reality, or rather layers of unreality that create a dream like reality you can get lost in, with an adventure film right out of his imagination," Rodriguez said. "If we get the script in the next couple months, by the end of spring or start of summer, we start pre-production."